Sean McGrath

Friday, February 23, 2018

The word “document”
is, like the word “database”, simple on the outside and complex on
the inside.

Most of us carry around pragmatically fuzzy definitions
of these in our heads. Since the early days of personal computers
there have been software suites/bundles available that have included
distinct tools to manage “documents” and “databases”,
treating them as different types of information object. The first such package
I used was called SMART running on an IBM PC XT machine in the late
Eighties. It had a 10MB hard disk. Today, that is hardly enough to store a single document, but I digress...

I have used many other Office Suites since then, most of which have
withered on the vine in enterprise computing, with the notable
exception of Microsoft Office. I find it interesting that of the
words typically associated with office suites, namely, “database”,
“word processor”, “presentation”, and “spreadsheet” the
two that are today most tightly bound to Microsoft office are
“spreadsheet” and “presentation” to the point where “Excel”
and “Powerpoint” have become generic terms for “spreadsheet”
and “presentation” respectively. I also think it is interesting Excel has become the de-facto heart of Microsoft Office in the business community with Word/Access/Powerpoint being of secondary importance as "must haves" in office environments, but again I digress...

In trying to chip away
at the problem of defining a “document” I think it is useful to
imagine having the full Microsoft office suite at your disposal and
asking the question “when should I reach for Word instead of one of
the other icons when entering text?” The system I worked in in the Nineties, mentioned
previously in this series, required a mix of classic field-type
information along with unstructured paragraphs/tables/bulleted lists.
If I were entering that text into a computer today with Microsoft
Office at my disposal, would I reach for the word processor icon or
the database icon?

I would reach for the
Word icon. Why? Well, because there are a variety of techniques I can
use in Word to enter/tag field-type textual information and many techniques
for entering unstructured paragraphs/tables/bulleted lists. The
opposite is not true. Databases tend to excel (no pun intended) at
field-type information but be limited in their support for
unstructured paragraphs/tables/bulleted lists – often relegating
the latter to “blob” fields that are second-class citizens in the
database schema.

Moreover, these days, the tools available for
post-processing Word's .docx file format make it much easier than
ever before to extract classic “structured XML” from Word
documents but with the vital familiarity and ease of use for the
authors/editors I mentioned previously.

Are there exceptions?
Absolutely. There are always exceptions. However, if your data
structure necessarily contains a non-trivial amount of unstructured
or semi-structured textual content and if your author/edit community wants to
think about the content in document/word-processor terms, I believe
today version of Word with its docx file format is generally
speaking a much better starting point than any database front-end
or spreadsheet front-end or web-browser front-end or any structured XML editing tool front-end.

Yes, it can get messy to do the post-processing of the data but given a choice between a solution
architecture that guarantees me beautifully clean data at the
back-end but an author/edit community who hate it, versus a solution
architecture that involves extra content enrichment work at the back
end but happy author/edit users, I have learned to favor the latter every time.

Note I did not start there! I was on the opposite side of this for many,
many years, thinking that structured author/edit tools, enforcing structure at the front-end was the way to go. I built a few beautiful structured systems that
ultimately failed to thrive because the author/edit user community
wanted something that did not “beep” as they worked on content. I myself, when writing the
books I wrote for Prentice-Hall (books on SGML and XML - of all things!), I myself wanted something that did not beep!

Which brings me
(finally!), to my answer to the question “What is a document?”. My
answer is that a document is a textual information artifact where the
final structure of the artifact itself is only obvious after
it has been created/modified and thus requires an author/edit user
experience that gets out of the way of the users creative
processes until the user decides to impose structure – if they
decide to impose a structure at all.

There is no guaranteed schema validity other than
that most generic of schemas that splits text into flows, paragraphs,
words, glyphs etc and allows users to combine content and presentation as they see fit.

On top of that low level structure, anything goes – at least until the
point where the user has decided that the changes to the information
artifact are “finished”. At the point where the intellectual work has been done figuring our that the document should say and how it should say it, it is completely fine - and generally very useful - to be able to validate against higher level, semantic structures such as "chapter", "statute", "washing machine data sheet" etc.

The big lesson of my career to date in high volume document management/processing is that if you seek to impose this semantic structure on the author/edit community rather than have them come to you and ask for some structure imposition, you will struggle mightily to have a successful system.

Friday, February 09, 2018

By the late Nineties, I
was knee deep in the world of XML and the world of Python, loving the
way that these two amazing tools allowed tremendous amounts of
automation to be brought to traditionally labor intensive document
processing/publishing tasks. This was boom time in electronic publishing and every new year brought with it a new output format to target: Microsoft Multimedia Viewer, Windows Help, Folio Views, Lotus Notes and a whole host of proprietary formats we worked on for clients. Back then, HTML was just another output for us to target. Little did we know back then that it would eclipse all the others.

Just about twenty years
ago now - in the fall of 1998 - , I co-presented a tutorial on XML at the International
Python Conference in Houston, Texas. [1]. At that same conference, I
presented a paper on high volume XML processing with Python [2]. Back
in those days, we had some of the biggest corpora of XML anywhere in
the world, here in Ireland. Up to the early/mid oozies, I did a lot of conference
presentations and become associated with the concept of XML
processing pipelines[3].

Then a very interesting
thing happened. We began to find ourselves working more and more in
environments where domain experts –not data taggers or software
developers – needed to create and update XML documents. Around this
time I was also writing books on markup languages for Prentice
Hall[4] and had the opportunity to put “the shoe on the other foot”
so-to-speak, and see things from an authors perspective.

It was then that I
experienced what I now consider to be a profound truth of the vast
majority of documents in the world - something that gets to the heart of what a document actually is which distinguishes it from other forms of digital information. Namely, that documents are typically
very “structured” when they are finished but are highly
unstructured when then are being created or in the midst of update
cycles.

I increasingly found
myself frustrated with XML authoring tools that would force me to
work on my document contents in a certain order and beep at me unless my documents were
“structured” at all times. I confess there were
many times when I abandoned structured editors for my own author/edit
work with XML and worked in the free-flowing world of the Emacs text editor or
in word processors with the tags plainly visible as raw text.

I began to appreciate that the ability to easily
create/update content is a requirement that must be met if the value
propositions of structured documents are to be realized, in most
cases. There is little value in a beautifully structured, immensely
powerful back-end system for processing terabytes of documents coming
in from domain experts unless said domain experts are happy to work
with the author/edit tools.

For a while, I believed
it was possible to get to something that authors would like, by customizing
the XML editing front-ends. However, I found that over and over
again, two things started happening, often in parallel. Firstly, the
document schemas became less and less structured so as to accommodate
the variations in real-world documents and also to avoid “beeping”
at authors where possible. Secondly, no amount of GUI customization seemed to be enough for the authors to feel comfortable with the XML
editors.

“Why can't it work
like Word?” was a phrase that began to pop up more and more in conversations with authors. For
quite some time, while Word's file format was not XML-based, I would
look for alternatives that would be Word-like in terms of the
end-user experience, but with file formats I could process with custom
code on the back end.

For quite a few years,
StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice fitted the bill and we have had a
lot of success with it. Moreover, it allowed for levels of
customization and degrees of business-rule validation that XML
schema-based approaches cannot touch. We learned may techniques and
tricks over the years to guide authors in the creation of structured
content without being obtrusive and interrupting their authoring flow. In
particular, we learned to think about document validation as a
function that the authors themselves have control over. They get to
decide when their content should be checked for structural and
business rules – not the software.

Fast forward to today.
Sun Microsystems is no more. OpenOffice/LibreOffice do not appear to
be gaining the traction in the enterprise that I suspected they would
a decade ago. Googles office suite – ditto. Native, browser based
document editing (such as W3C's Amaya [5])
does not appear to be getting traction either....

All
the while, the familiar domain expert/author's mantra rings in my ears
“Why can't it work like Word?”

As
of 2018, this is a more interesting question than it has ever been in
my opinion. That is where we will turn next.

Friday, January 26, 2018

In the early Nineties,
I found myself tasked with the development of a digital guide to
third level education in Ireland. The digital product was to be an
add-on to a book based product, created in conjunction with the author of the book. The organization of the book was very
regular. Each third level course had a set of attributes such as
entry level qualifications, duration, accrediting institution,
physical location of the campus, fees and so on. All neatly laid out, on page per course, with some free-flowing narrative at the bottom of each page. The goals of the
digital product were to allow prospective students to search based on
different criteria such as cost ranges, course duration and so on.

Step number one was
getting the information from the paper book into a computer and it is in
this innocuous sounding step that things got very interesting. The
most obvious approach - it seemed to me at the time - was to create a programmable database – in something like
Clipper (a database programming language that was very popular with
PC developers at the time). Tabular databases were perfect for 90%
of the data – the “structured” parts such as dates, numbers,
short strings of text. However, the tabular databases had no good way
of dealing with the free-flowing narrative text that accompanied each
course in the book. It had paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold/italics and underline...

An alternative approach
would be to start with a word-processor – as opposed to a database
– as it would make handling the free-flowing text (and associated
formatting, bold/italic, bulleted lists etc.) easy. However, the word
processor approach did not make it at all easy to process the
“structured” parts in the way I wanted to (in many cases, the word processors of the day stored information in encrypted formats too).

My target output was a free
viewer that came with Windows 3.1 known as Windows Help. If I could
make the content programmable, I reasoned, I could automatically generate all
sorts of different views of the data as Windows Help files and ship
the floppy disk without needing to write my own viewer. (I
know this sounds bizarre now but remember this work predated the
concept of a generic web browser by a few years!)

I felt I was facing a
major fork in the road in the project. By going with a database, some
things were going to be very easy but some very awkward. By going
with a document instead...same thing. Some things easy, some very
awkward. I trawled around in my head for something that might have
the attributes of a database AND of a document at the same time.

As
luck would have it, I had a Byte Magazine from 1992 on a shelf. It had an article by Jon Udell that
talked about SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language. It triggered memories of a brief encounter I had had
with SGML back in Trinity College when Dr. David Abrahamson had referencing it
in his compiler design course, back in 1986. Back then, SGML was not
yet an ISO standard (it became one in 1987). I remember in those days hearing about
“tagging" and how an SGML parser could enforce structure – any
structure you liked – on text – in a similar way to programming
language parsers enforced structure on, say, Pascal source code.

I remember thinking
“surely if SGML can deal with the hierarchical structures like you
typically find in programming languages, it can deal with the
simpler, flatter structures you get in tabular databases?”. If it could, I reasoned, then surely I could get the best of both worlds. My own data format that had what I needed from database-approaches but also what I needed from document approaches to data modelling?

I found – somehow
(this is all pre-internet remember. No Googling for me in those days.) – an address in Switzerland that I could
send some money to in the form of a money order, to get a 3.5 inch floppy back by return
post, with an SGML parser on it called ArcSGML. I also found out about
an upcoming gathering in Switzerland of SGML enthusiasts. A colleague, Neville Bagnall
went over and came back with all sorts of invaluable information
about this new thing (to us) called generalized markup.

We set to work in earnest. We
created our first ever SGML data model. Used ArcSGML to ensure we
were getting the structure and consistency we wanted in our source data. We set about
inventing tags for things like “paragraph”, “bold”,
“cross-reference” as well as the simpler field-like tags such as
“location”, “duration” etc. We sent about looking at ways to
process the resultant SGML file. The output from ArcSGML was not very
useful for processing, but we soon found out about another SGML parser called SGMLS
by Englishman James Clark. We got our hands on it and having taken one look at
the ESIS format it produced, we fell in love with it. Now we had a
tool that could validate the structure of our document/database and
feed us a clean stream of data to process downstream in our own software.

Back then C++ was our
weapon of choice. Over time our code turned into a toolkit of SGML
processing components called IDM (Intelligent Document Manager) which
we applied to numerous projects in what became known as the
“electronic publishing era”. Things changed very rapidly in those
days. The floppy disks gave way to the CD-ROMs. We transitioned from
Windows Help files to another Microsoft product called Microsoft
Multimedia Viewer. Soon the number of “viewers” for electronic
books exploded and we were working on Windows Help, Multimedia
Viewer, Folio Views, Lotus Notes to name but four.

As the number of
distinct outputs we needed to generate grew, so too did the value of our investment getting
up to speed with SGML. We could maintain a single source of content
but generate multiple output formats from it, each leveraging the
capabilities of the target viewer in a way that made them look and
feel like they had been authored directly in each tool as opposed to
programmatically generated for them.

My concept of a
“document” changed completely over this period. I began to see
how formatting – and content – could be separated from each other. I began to see how in so
doing, a single data model could be used to manage content that is
tabular (like a classic tabular database) as well as content that is
irregular, hierarchical, even recursive. Moreover, I could see how
keeping the formatting out of the core content made it possible to
generate a variety of different formatting “views” of the same
content.

It would be many years
later that the limitations of this approach became apparent to me.
Back then, I thought it was a completely free lunch. I was a fully paid-up convert to the concept of
generalized markup and machine readable, machine validatable
documents. As luck would have it, this coincided with the emergence
of a significant market for SGML and SGML technologies. Soon I was
knee deep in SGML parsers, SGML programming languages, authoring systems,
storage systems and was developing more and more of our own tools,
first in C++, then Perl, then Python.

The next big transition
in my thinking about documents came when I needed to factor
non-technical authors into my thinking. This is where I will turn
next. What is a document? - Part 6.

Monday, January 15, 2018

In the late Eighties, I
had access to an IBM PC XT machine that had Wordperfect 5.1[1]
installed on it. Wordperfect was both
intimidating and powerful. Intimidating because when it booted, it
completely cleared the PC screen and unless you knew the function keys
(or had the sought-after function key overlay [2]) you were left to
you own devices to figure out how to use it.

It was also very
powerful for its day. It could wrap words automatically (a big deal!). It could redline/strikeout text which made
it very popular with lawyers working with contracts. It could also
split its screen in two, giving you a normal view of the document on
top and a so-called “reveal codes” view on the bottom. In the
“reveal codes” area you could see the tags/markers used for
formatting the text. Not only that, but you could choose to modify
the text/formatting from either window.

This idea that a
document could have two “faces” so to speak and that you could
move between them made a lasting impression on me. Every other
DOS-based word processor I came across seemed to me to be variations
on the themes I had first seen in Wordperfect e.g. Wordstar,
Multimate and later Microsoft Word for DOS. I was aware of the
existence of IBM Displaywriter but did not have access to it. (The
significance of IBM in all this document technology stuff only became
apparent to me later.)

The next big "aha moment" for me came with the arrival of a plug-in board for IBM PCs
called the Hercules Graphics Card[3]. Using this card in conjunction
with the Ventura Publisher[4] on DRI's GEM graphics environment [5] dramatically expanded
the extent to which documents could be formatted - both on screen an on the resultant paper. Multiple fonts,
multiple columns, complex tables, equations etc. Furthermore, the
on-screen representation mirrored the final printed output closely in
what is now universally known as WYSIWYG.

Shortly after that, I
found myself with access to an Apple Lisa [6] and then an Apple Fat
Mac 512 with Aldus (later Adobe) Pagemaker [7] and an Apple
Laserwriter[8]. My personal computing world split into two.
Databases, spreadsheets etc. revolved around IBM PCs and PC
compatibles such as Compaq, Apricot etc. Document processing and
Desktop Publishing revolved around Apple Macs and Laser Printers.

I became
intoxicated/obsessed with the notion that the formatting of documents
could be pushed further and further by adding more and more powerful
markup into the text. I got myself a copy of The Postscript Language Tutorial and
Cookbook by Adobe[9] and started to write Postscript programs by
hand.

I found that the
original Apple Laserwriter had a 25 pin RS/232 port. I had access to
an Altos multi-terminal machine [10]. It had some text-only
applications on it. A spreadsheet from Microsoft called – wait for
it – Multiplan (long before Excel) – running on a variant of –
again, wait for it – Unix call Microsoft Xenix [11].

Well, I soldered up a serial
cable that allowed me to connect the Altos terminal directly to the
Apple Laserwriter. I found I could literally type in Postscript
command at the terminal window and get pages to print out. I could
make the Apple Laserwriter do things that I could not make it do via Aldus
Pagemaker by taking directly to its Postscript engine.

Looking back on it now,
this was as far down the rabbit hole of “documents as computer
programs” that I ever went. Later I would discover TeX and find it
in many ways easier to work with than programming Postscript directly. My career
started to take me into computer graphics rather than document
publishing. For a few years I was much more concerned with Bezier
Curves and Bitblits[12] using a Texas Instruments TMS 34010[13] to
generate realtime displays of financial futures time-series analysis (A field known as technical analysis in the world of financial trading
[14]).

It would be some years
before I came back to the world of documents and when I did, my
approach route back, caused me to revisit my “documents as programs”
world view from the ground up.

It all started with a
database program for the PC called dBase by Ashton Tate[15]. Starting from the perspective of a database made all the difference to my world view. More on
that, next time.

Tuesday, January 02, 2018

Back in 1983, I
interacted with computers in three main ways. First, I had access to
a cantankerous digital logic board [1] which allowed me to play around with boolean logic
via physical wires and switches.

Second I had access to a Rockwell 6502
machine with 1k of RAM (that's 1 kilobyte) which had a callous-forming keyboard and a single line (not single monitor –
single line) LED display called an Aim 65[2]. Third, at home I had a
Sinclair ZX80 [3] which I could hook up to a black and white TV set and get a whopping
256 x 192 pixel display.

Back then, I had a
fascination with the idea of printing stuff out from a computer. An early indication – that I
completely blanked on at the time – that I was genetically predisposed to an
interest in typesetting/publishing. The Aim 65 printed to a cash
register roll which was not terribly exciting (another early indicator that I
blanked on at the time). The ZX80 did not have a printer at all...home printing was not a thing back in 1984. In 1984 however, the Powers That Be in TCD gave us second year computer science newbies rationed access to a Vax 11/870, with glorious Adm3a[4] terminals.

In a small basement
terminal room on Pearst St, in Dublin, there was a clutch of these terminals and we would eagerly stumble down the stairs at the appointed times, to get at them. Beating time in
the corner of that terminal room, most days, was a huge, noisy dot matrix printer[5],
endlessly chewing boxes of green/white striped continuous computer
paper. I would stare at it as it worked. In particular, finding it
particularly fascinating that it could create bold text by the clever
trick of backing up the print head and re-doing text with a fresh
layer of ink.

We had access to a
basic e-mail system on the Vax. One day, I received an e-mail from a
classmate (sender lost in the mists of time) in which one of the
words was drawn to the screen twice in quick succession as the text
scrolled on the screen (these were 300 baud terminals - the text appeared character by character, line by line, from top to bottom). Fascinated by this, I printed out the e-mail, and found that
the twice-drawn word ended up in bold on paper.

"What magic is this?", I thought. By looking
under the hood of the text file, I found that the highlighted word – I believe it was the word “party” – came out in bold because five control characters
(Control-H [5] characters[6]) had been placed right after the word. When displayed
on screen, the ADM3a terminal drew the word, then backed up 5 spaces because of the Control-H's,
then drew the word again. When printed, the printer did the same but
because ink is cumulative, the word came out in bold. Ha!

Looking back on it,
this was the moment when it occurred to me that text files could be
more that simply text. They could also include instructions
and these instructions could do all sorts of interesting
things to a document when it was printed/displayed...As luck would have it, I also had access to a wide-carriage
Epson FX80[7] dot matrix printer through a part-time programming job
I had while in college.

Taking the Number 51 bus to
college from Clondalkin in the mornings, I read the Epson FX-80 manual from cover to cover. Armed
with a photocopy of the “escape codes”[8] page, I was soon a dab hand
at getting text to print out in bold, condensed, strike-through,
different font sizes...

After a while, my Epson FX-80 explorations ran out of steam. I basically ran out of codes to play with. There
was a finite set of them to choose from. Also, it became very
apparent to me that littering my text files with these codes was an
ugly and error prone way to get nice print outs. I began to search for a better way. The “better way”
for me had two related parts. By day, on the Vax 11/780 I found out
about a program called Runoff[9]. And by night I found out about a
word-processor called Worstar[10].

Using Runoff, I did not have to embed, say, Epson FX80 codes into my text files, I could embed
more abstract commands that the program would then translate to
printer-specific commands when needed. I remember using “.br” to create a
line break (ring any bells, HTML people?). “.bp” began a new
page, “.ad” right-aligned text. etc.

Using Wordstar on an
Apple II machine running CP/M (I forgot to mention I had access to
one of them also...I wrote my first ever spreadsheet in Visicalc on
this machine, but that is another story.) I could so something
similar. I could add in control codes for formatting and it would
translate for the current printer as required.

So far, everything I
was using to mess around with documents was based on visible coding systems. i.e. the coding added to the
documents was always visible on the screen interspersed with the
text. So far also, the codes
added to the documents where all control codes. i.e. imperative
instructions about how a document should be formatted.

The
significance of this fact only became clear to me later but before we
get there, I need to say a few words about my early time with
Wordperfect on an IBM PC XT. My first encounter with a pixel-based
user interface – it was called GEM [11] and ran on top of DOS on
IBM PCs. An early desktop publishing system called Ventura Publisher
from Ventura Software which ran on GEM. I also need to say a little
about the hernia-generating Apple Lisa[12] that I once had to carry up a spiral stair-case.

Oh, and the mind blowing
moment I first used Aldus Pagemaker[13] on a Fat Mac 512k[14] to
produce a two columned sales brochure on an Apple Laserwriter[15] and
discovered the joys of Postscript.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Back in 1985, when I
needed to create a “document” on a computer, I had only two
choices. (Yes, I am indeed avoiding trying to define “document”
just yet. We will come back to it when we have more groundwork laid
for a useful definition.) The first choice involved typing into what
is known generically as a “text editor”. Back in those days, US
ASCII was the main encoding for text and it allowed for just the
basic symbols of letters, numbers and a few punctuation symbols. In
those days, the so called “text files” created by these “text
editors” could be viewed on screens which typically had 80 columns
and 25 rows. They could also be printed onto paper, using either “dot
matrix” printers or higher resolution, computerized typewriters
such as the so-called “golf ball” typewriters/printers which
mimicked a human typist using a ribbon-based impact printer.

The second choice was to wedge the text into little boxes called "fields" to be stored in a "database". Yes, My conceptual model of
text in computers in those early days was a very binary one. (Some nerd
humour in the last sentence.)

On one hand, I could type stuff into
small “boxes” on a screen which typically resulted in the
creation of some form of “structured” data file e.g. a CODASYL
database [1]. On the other hand, I could type stuff into an
expandable digital sheet of paper without imposing any structure on
the text, other than a collection of text characters, often chunked
with what we used to call CRLF separators (Carriage Return, Line
Feed).

(Aside: You can see the typewriter influence in the terminology
here. Return the carriage (holding the print head) to the left of the
page. Feed the page upwards by one line. So Carriage Return + Line
Feed = CR/LF).

(Aside:I find the
origins of some of this terminology is often news to younger
developers who wonder why moving to a new line is two characters
instead of one on some machines. Surely “newline” is one thing?
Well, it was two originally because one command moves the carriage
back (the “CR”) and another command moved the paper up a line
“LF”, hence the common pairing: CR/LF. When I explain this I
double up by explaining “uppercase/lowercase”. The origins of the
latter in particular, are not well known to digital natives in my
experience.)

From my first
encounters with computers, this difference in how the machines
handled storing data intrigued me. On one hand, there were
“databases”. These were stately, structured, orderly digital
objects. Mathematicians could say all sorts of useful things about
them and create all sorts of useful algorithms to process them. The
“databases” are designed for automation.

On the other hand,
there was the rebellious, free-wheeling world of text files.
Unstructured. Disorderly. A pain in the neck for automation.
Difficult to reason about and create algorithms for, but
fantastically useful precisely because they were unstructured and
disorderly.

I loved text files back
then. I still love them today. But as I began to dig deeper into
computer science I began to see that the binary world view : database
versus text. Structured versus unstructured. Was simple, elegant and
wrong. Documents can indeed be “structured”. Document processing could indeed be automated. It is possible to
reason about them, and create algorithms for them, but it took me
quite a while to get to grips with how this can be done.

My journey of discovery
started with an ADM 3A+ terminal to a VAX 11/780 mini-computer (by
day) [2] and an Apple IIe personal computer running CP/M – by
night[3].

For the former, a program called RUNOFF. For the latter, a program called Wordstar and one of my favorite pieces of hardware of all time : an Epson FX80 dot matrix printer.

Thursday, December 07, 2017

I am seeing a
significant up-tick in interest in the concept of structured/semantic
documents in the world of law at present. My guess is that this is as
a consequence of the activity surrounding machine learning/AI in law
at the moment.

It has occurred to me that some people with
law/law-tech backgrounds are coming to some of the structured/semantic document
automation concepts anew whereas people with backgrounds in, for
example, electronic publishing (Docbook etc.), financial reporting
(XBRL etc.), healthcare (HL7 etc.) have already “been around the
block” so-to-speak, on the opportunities, challenges and pragmatic
realities behind the simple sounding – and highly appealing –
concept of a “structured” document.

In this series of
posts, I am going to outline how I see structured documents, drawing from the 30 (phew!) or so
years of experience I have accumulated in working with them. My hope is that what I have to say on the subject will be of interest to those newly arriving in
the space. I suspect that at least some of the new arrivals are asking themselves
“surely this has been tried before?” and looking to learn what
they can from those who have "been there". Hopefully, I
can save some people some time and help them avoid some of the
potential pitfalls and “gotchas” as I have had plenty of experience in finding these.

As I start out on this series of blog posts,
I notice with some concern that a chunk of this history – from late
Eighties to late Nineties – is getting harder and harder to find
online as the years go by. So many broken links to old conference
websites, so many defunct publications....

This was the dawn of the
electronic publishing era and coincided with a rapid transition from
mainframe green-screens to dialup compuserv, to CD-ROMs, to the
Internet and then to the Web, bringing us to where we are today. A
period of creative destruction in the world of the written word
without parallel in the history of civilization actually. I cannot help feeling that we have a better record of what happened in the world from the time of Gutenburg's printing press to the glory years of paper-centric desktop publishing, than we do for the period that followed it when we increasingly transitioned away from fixed-format, physical representations of knowledge. But I digress....

For me, the story
starts in June 1992 with a Byte magazine article by Jon Udell[1] with
a title that promised a way to “turn mounds of documents into
information that can boost your productivity and innovation”. It was exactly what I was looking for in 1992 for a project I was working on. An electronic education reference guide to be distributed on 3.5 inch floppy disks to every school in Ireland.

Turning mounds of documents into information. Sound familiar? Sound
like any recent pitch you have heard in the world of law? Well, it
may surprise you to hear that the technology Jon Udell's article was
about – SGML – was largely invented by a lawyer called Dr Charles
F. Goldfarb[2]. SGML set in motion a cascade of technologies that
have lead to the modern web. HTML is the way it is, in large part,
because of SGML. In other words, we have a lawyer to thank for a
large aspect of how the Web works. I suspect that I have just
surprised some folks by saying that:-)

Oh, and while I am on a
roll making surprising statements, let me also state that the cloud –
running as it does in large part on linux servers – is, in part,
the result of a typesetting R&D project in AT&T Bell Labs
back in the Seventies.

So, in an interesting
way, modern computing can trace its feature set back to a problem in the legal department. Namely, how best to create documents in computers so that
the content of the documents can be processed automatically and re-used in different
contexts?

More on that later, but best to start at the beginning which for me was 1985. The
year when a hirsute computer science undergraduate (me) took a class in
compiler design from Dr. David Abrahamson[3] in Trinity College
Dublin and was introduced to the wonderful world of machine readable
documents.